Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and because it's relevant to a book I'm trying to get off the ground. Think of Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs at the bottom and more abstract needs – cognitive, aesthetic and "self-actualization" – at the top. If primitive societies could satisfy the physiological needs with a 15-hour workweek, then they must have had a lot of time to work on the higher needs. THAT's not the typical picture of primitive society. Economists see growth as being driven by the necessities at the bottom of the pyramid. I think they've got it wrong. It's driven from the top.

 

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 This title caught my attention:

Why Do We Work So Damn Much? Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?

I immediately answered:

Because we’ve forgotten how to play? We’re stuck in work mode and can’t get out.

Is that the article is about? The article is an interview that Ezra Klein (NYTimes) conducts with anthropologist James Suzman, who has done research among hunter-gatherers and has recently published a book, Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Here’s how Klein sets it up:

So one of the truly great essays in the history of economic thought is this 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” And it’s a weird essay. It’s done in the depth of the Great Depression, so everything is terrible, and people are really poor. But Keynes steps back and just imagines the future.

And he makes his now famous prediction that by 2030, which was a 100 years hence, human beings would be so much richer, so much more technologically advanced, that the problem of scarcity — that the problem that had defined economics, and arguably, human civilization, until then — would have been solved. And now we’d only work 15 hours a week. And the whole problem would be what to do with all this time.

And the reason this essay still gets talked about and debated and written about today is that Keynes was interestingly right and wrong. The part of this that seems hard and probably seemed very out there when he did it, the calculations for how much richer we’d get in 100 years, that was not just right. If anything, it was conservative. We passed his predictions for income growth decades ago. And then we got even richer than that.

But you may notice we don’t work 15 hours a week. In fact, in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work. And now we’ve built a social value system. So the reward for making a lot of money at work is, you get to do even more work.

Here’s where Suzman comes in:

And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.

But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.

That’s heading where I think we need to go. Just how far Suzman gets us, that’s not clear.

So, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism:

JAMES SUZMAN: One of the most distinctive features about the Ju/’hoansi and, indeed, many of the other hunter-gatherer societies, similar ones, was that they were, to use the words of Richard Lee, fiercely egalitarian. And they had various mechanisms to manage this egalitarianism. Now one of the most interesting mechanisms was a system called demand sharing. One anthropologist who didn’t like it much called it tolerated theft.

And it is a system which is, in many ways, the complete inversion of our rules of giving, sharing, and taking. When we ask somebody for something, we say please. It’s an offer of a debt. When somebody gives us something, we say thank you. I’m in your debt. There’s a kind of sense of an exchange going on. And it is in the right of the giver. And generally, I was always brought up, wait for somebody to offer you something. And always say thank you and be in their debt. And it’s effectively in the rights of the giver to deny somebody something that they asked for.

In Ju/’hoan cultures and, indeed, many other hunting and gathering cultures, that relationship is inverted. Basically, in an idealized form, demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else. And remember, these are relatively small social groupings. Can go to anybody else and demand something from them. So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me.

And it would be considered extremely rude — in fact, it would be considered offensive — if I don’t give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it’s not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand. So what you have is a society where, in effect, everybody can spontaneously tax everybody else. The net result of this is that nobody bothers acquiring services because you’re just going to share it and give it away anyway. And people end up spontaneously sharing everything.

And they see a certain virtue. It’s not a completely unconscious thing. I mean, culture is habitual. It becomes unconscious. But people are aware of the virtues of it. And in hunter-gatherer life, there was a real sense that if anybody tries to accumulate resources or dominate the distribution and flow of resources, it is socially unhealthy. It produces tensions. It produces anxieties. It produces a hierarchy or an attempted hierarchy. It adds a whole level of risk and cost to the social life of the group.

What about violence?

JAMES SUZMAN: My perspective on demand sharing was that it certainly made anthropologists feel violent until they got a bit used to it. But amongst everybody else, it was actually something very peaceable. Now, yeah, there’s been this pretty much endless debate. And it really is a debate about modernity, whether we’re on this great path of progress or not. To make the case of progress, it helps to say that actually our lives in the past were much more miserable and much more violent.

Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap

I’ve been reading Mark Moffett’s new book:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

It is at heart a work of natural philosophy, an old term not in much use anymore. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: our do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? To do so he surveys the animal world and the follows the distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

In this post I offer a few excepts and some occasional comments on them.

Conclusion

As is often the case, I didn’t start at the beginning. I started with the conclusion, from which I offer these excerpts:

357:

Markers are essential components in all societies of more than a few hundred individuals, whether mighty human or mere insect. At a certain point of growth, however, markers alone are insufficient to hold a society of humans together.

359:

As we look to the future, it may be illuminating to reframe the discussion around an idea cherished by people everywhere, and which I have brought up only I passing thus far: their freedom.

362:

Our misfortune has been, and will be always, that societies don’t eliminate discontent; they simply redirect it toward outsiders–which paradoxically can include the ethnic groups within them.

And then it was off to Chapters 8, “Band Societies”, 9, “The Nomadic Life”, and 10, “Settling Down”. I offer some excerpts and a few comments of my own.

Band Societies

103:

There are shelves of articles and books by anthropologists who write about hunter-gatherers based solely on what happened in bands, while ignoring how hunter-gatherer bands identified with a broader society.

Because the members of human band societies, as well as chimpanzee societies, rarely come together, finding out where a society stops and the next starts can be tough, but sharp separation in the memberships of societies are in place just the same. Numerous accounts tell how hunter-gathers of recent centuries felt secure in the presence of their “own kind.”

And I’ve read a few of those books and articles, so this was news to me. I’d thought that they just wandered about all year, spending weeks or perhaps months in one place and then moving on, the same little band. But no it isn’t unusual for a number of bands to gather together and participate in a single activity. Thus a bit latter he’ll mention that “every Autumn in North America, bands of certain tribes gathered to frighten herds of bison over cliffs” (125), something I’d read about when I was young.

This behavior motivates a distinction that is central to the book, that between a group and a society. In this case the group is the band of people who live and travel together year-round. The society, on the other hand, is the large collectivity, consisting of all those groups of individuals who recognize one another as being of the same people. The may not and generally will not know everyone in the society very well, but they recognize rights and obligations with respect to one another that they do not recognize with respect to those outside the society.

106:

Among the Bushmen, bands of the same society occupied contiguous spaces, whereas a no-man’s land lay between different societies. Similar unoccupied gaps separate the societies of other species, too–communities of chimpanzees, packs of wolves, and colonies of fire ants.

109:

For hunter-gatherers the signage of daily existence was understated. Each nuance about the natural world and the people in it filled their senses. Distinctions between their neighbors that to us would be slight would have stood out as plainly as grass blades bent by a passing antelope.

111:

After all, given the low density of most hunter-gatherers in antiquity, people would have encountered an infinitesimal fraction of the outsiders most of us are familiar with today.

And this, I might add, underlines one of the central themes of the book. We now live in societies where we are constantly meeting and interacting with people we do not know. We think nothing of it. And yet, in a broad context, it is very odd. How do we manage to do it?

The Nomadic Life

Moffett likens a hunter-gather band to a small factory. Everyone works, 112: "Few tasks in a band factory demanded multiple players."

113:

The rhythm of expeditions orchestrated by sex added a layer of complexity beyond that of the movements of almost all other animals.

That is, to a first approximation, with allowances from some differences between male and female worlds, every adult in such a society knows everything there is to know. With the exception of a ritual/medical specialist, a medicine man or shaman, there are no occupational specialists. Everyone must make everything they need for daily life and perform every necessary task.

114:

An upside of this factory life was that people weren’t occupied with raising crops or struggling to take in excess food. They ended up with leisure time–a commodity that earned these nomads the moniker “the original affluent society.” [...]

That, and the bare-bones nature of ownership, meant everything about their nomadic way of life pretty much had to fit inside each member’s head, even if peers, and especially the elderly, were useful at reinforcing what was correct. [...]

Otherwise the sole specialized line of work in a band was a medicine man. Even then, Aboriginal healers, whose training in that role could take years, were still expected to carry out life’s mundane tasks themselves.

I find that last very interesting and extraordinarily important. It isn’t hunters or weavers or cooks and so forth who are specialists, but medicine men, who are, in that role, story tellers and ritualists as well. Of course medicine is fundamental – we in the United States devote enormous resources to it ourselves (not always very wisely or effectively either) – but in simple hunter-gather societies the telling of mythic stories and the enactment of ritual was a part, indeed much of, the healing process. The medicine man was, in effect, in charge of the mythic worldview by which the society understands itself in the world.

I’m thus reminded of Shelley’s assertion: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Has it always been thus? Of course the medicine man doesn’t think of themselves as originator of the stories. They’re only passing on the stories as they’ve been handed down to them, ultimately from supernatural creatures.

115:

Still, evincing one’s talents was a delicate matter. Because of the intimacy of life around camps, band societies rarely tolerated a showoff. [...]

So without specialists or jobs, band societies offered opportunities for dexterous toolmakers, dazzling storytellers, skilled mediators of social conflicts, and thoughtful decision makers.

116:

Among other indications that life in the society completely expressed their worldview, the bands didn’t distinguish sacred beliefs (usually relating directly to nature) from other aspects of life. Likewise, rituals, entertainment, and education–all matters except family matters were part and parcel of their relationship to the society as a whole.

121:

In contrast to the rapport afforded by a band, the societies that hunter-gatherers belonged to were about identities–inclusion and exclusion. Even though each band carried out its quotidian chores alone, the society offered a security blanket, supporting reliable market and marriage relations beyond the local fireplace.

Skills and Division of Labor Among Hunter-Gatherers

Paul L. Hooper, Kathryn Demps, Michael Gurven, Drew Gerkey, Hillard S. Kaplan. Skills, division of labour and economies of scale among Amazonian hunters and South Indian honey collectors. Philosophical Transactions B. Published 26 October 2015.DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0008

Abstract: In foraging and other productive activities, individuals make choices regarding whether and with whom to cooperate, and in what capacities. The size and composition of cooperative groups can be understood as a self-organized outcome of these choices, which are made under local ecological and social constraints. This article describes a theoretical framework for explaining the size and composition of foraging groups based on three principles: (i) the sexual division of labour; (ii) the intergenerational division of labour; and (iii) economies of scale in production. We test predictions from the theory with data from two field contexts: Tsimane' game hunters of lowland Bolivia, and Jenu Kuruba honey collectors of South India. In each case, we estimate the impacts of group size and individual group members' effort on group success. We characterize differences in the skill requirements of different foraging activities and show that individuals participate more frequently in activities in which they are more efficient. We evaluate returns to scale across different resource types and observe higher returns at larger group sizes in foraging activities (such as hunting large game) that benefit from coordinated and complementary roles. These results inform us that the foraging group size and composition are guided by the motivated choice of individuals on the basis of relative efficiency, benefits of cooperation, opportunity costs and other social considerations.